Philosophy for most people conjures images of either very clever or very boring people talking about riddles or extremely complex problems that most of us neither know or care about but it is so much more when taught properly. It is traditionally separated into 5 disciplines but the one I am most interested in is logic although there might be some crossover into ethics depending on the logic.
For instance, should we kill healthy people to harvest their organs for sick people? 1 Person could help save 5 or more people! Many people, I would expect, would simply be disgusted by the idea but why? If people thought about it and analysed it, something that philosophy teaches, we might not actually know why we would be disgusted by the idea. Why do people bully each other, why do people get wound up, are some people born to be stupid? All of these might be interesting questions for children to debate at school and it might help them to avoid unhelpful situations.
The reason I was reminded of philosophy and why its application is important is looking at the wind power debate (realistically wind power vs nuclear power). I expect strong views on either side. 'Green' people find the idea of dirty fuel like uranium to be outrageous, nuclear people think that wind power is unworkable. The problem I have is that logic seems to be put to one side so people can have an argument based on their ethics rather than the practical reality of life. Some systems can go ahead without 100% certaintly, knowing that we can iron out difficulties on the way. For instance, we might think that a power station that needs to supply 5Gw on paper can only actually output 4.9Gw which leads to a shortfall but which in reality will probably never happen and by which time we can either improce the efficiency of the station or add another generator etc. Some systems, however, pass or fail on just one problem. If the UK wants 10% of its electricity from wind power then that 10% needs to be available all the time. Even 1 or 2 minutes of outage, although not a problem on paper (99.9% sounds good), the reality is that power cuts would have to be applied or the voltage would drop since people at work are not going to switch off their computers when a drop in the wind is detected. Some research guy at the Met centre recently said that during the winter, it is known that the wind can lull for sometimes a few days across most of Europe and that is now a BIG problem at a time when people are using the most energy. No-one will export to us because they will need their own power then.
I then wonder how much better our government decisions would be if philosophy was taught as a mandatory subject at school.
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